There he developed the concept of L'empire du bien (the Empire of the Good), and he collected materials to write his book Le XIXe siècle à travers les âges (The 19th Century through the Ages), published in 1984.
An exceptional literary stylist and novelist, Philippe Muray published many an article and essay in various French magazines such as L'Atelier du roman, criticizing what he saw as the absurdities and anomalies of the modern world.
A philosopher and an artist, he described the major upheavals that have led to the modern-day way of life, trying to show how some aspects of modernity such as jihadists and neofascists wholly embraced the views of those they opposed.
A productive intellectual who described himself as a student of Louis Ferdinand Céline, Balzac, Bloy, Bernanos, and Péguy, he coined numerous neologisms, mostly pejorative, such as "Mutin de Panurge" (any credulous person who believes himself a rebel and freethinker while following and enforcing the latest trends of the day), "Artistocrate" (an artist who is completely aligned with the political power structure of the day and whose artistic activity becomes that of a charge, as under the Ancien Régime), and "Rebellocrate" (a person who pretends to be radical but is in fact allied with the power structure).
In his non-fiction work The 21st Century throughout the Ages, Muray went on to explain how the gradual fall of the Church in Europe after the French Revolution gave rise, in its place, to a wave of occultism, protosocialist, and parapsychology ideologies.
For Muray, intellectuals such as Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Allan Kardec, Freud, Helena Blavatsky, Emile Zola, Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Foucault, and far-right thinkers such as Edouard Drumont were all proponents of some kind of occultism that manifested itself through different "brands" of "socialist" beliefs (though Muray nuanced his proposal: according to him some of these public figures also held views that also went against occultism, as in the case of Sigmund Freud).